So there's a book that I read on project gutenberg once expecting it to be super fucked up but it was actually a very important historical work:
DEVELOPING THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL POWERS OF ALL CHILDREN,
FROM ONE TO SEVEN YEARS OF AGE
BY SAMUEL WILDERSPIN, INVENTOR OF THE SYSTEM OF INFANT TRAINING
You can read about the author over here on wikipedia
Mr. Wilderspin had a vision for holistic children's education that was so far ahead of its time in some ways it still blows some modern ideas out of the fucking water.
He's credited with the invention of the playground, one of the people to come up with the idea of "picture books", and created many childrens toys including a proto version of that thing where you get to slide wooden beads along colourful wires and for that I owe him my life.
In his vision for schools, physical education was integrated into the entire day, through play. His schools that he ran had integrated indoor maypole swings, which were fun rewards to break up periods of intense concentration. They had integrated gardens in the play yards, and little museums with samples of different kinds of flora and fauna. His ideas for teaching geography included basically a tabletop game, and giant mats with scale to teach kids the practical difference in distances.
He also understood that a sudden education gap between children and their parents could lead to confusion, rejection, and anger from parents thinking that their child was making fun of them or being taught useless words for things they already know - risking them being pulled out of school - so he would go talk to parents and educate them as well.
One of the things he specifically warned against in this book was the separation of physical education into a specific block with arbitrary requirements, as he was a person who cared deeply about child welfare (in a very very very christian way but he was again: actively working on preventing abuse and reducing rates of child mortality and repeated child imprisonment), specifically BECAUSE it would traumatize children and make them hate exercise.
He focused on sensory play, in integrating running around into counting lessons and such. If I had gone to a school like the ones he designed, I would have been thrilled beyond measure. A lot of his ideas were eroded away over time, but I want to just share this very important note from him at the end of the book, after he'd written a prayer for the safety and wellbeing of children and for the spread of the system he'd come up with: "This prayer written more than thirty years ago. The reader will see a great portion of the prayer has been answered; the subject has been mooted in Parliament; the Government have mooted the question of Education; and even the sovereign has recommended attention to it in a speech from the throne. This feeling only wants a right direction given to it, and all will be well."
Things can be different again. We've learned so much more about how people learn and grow over time since Mr. Wilderspin's time in 1844.
So so many people all over the world are working on making things better for children still. I hope every baby being born gets to experience the fruits of those efforts, and the more of us push on a local level for improved conditions in accordance with current known best practices and update those regularly, the faster that will happen.
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